Posts Tagged ‘growth’

June 6, 2012, marked a milestone in the further advancement of the Internet: World IPv6 Launch Day. It was by no means an Earth-shattering event or a “flag day” where everyone switched over to IPv6 completely … What actually happened was that content providers enabled AAAA DNS records for their websites and other applications, and ISPs committed to providing IPv6 connectivity to at least 1% of their customers by this date.

What’s all of this fuss about the IPv6 transition about? The simplest way to explain the situation is that the current Internet can stay working as it does, using IPv4 addresses, forever … if we’re okay with it not growing any more. If no more homes and businesses wanted to get on the Internet, and no more new phones or tablets were produced, and no more websites or applications were created. SoftLayer wouldn’t be able to keep selling new servers either. To prevent or lose that kind of organic growth would be terrible, so an alternative had to be created to break free from the limitations of IPv4.

The long-term goal is to migrate the entire Internet to the IPv6 standard in order to eliminate the stifling effect of impending and inevitable IP address shortages. It is estimated that there are roughly 2.5 billion current connections to the Internet today, so to say the transition has a lot of moving parts would be an understatement. That complexity doesn’t lessen the urgency of the need to make the change, though … In the very near future, end-users and servers will no longer be able to get IPv4 connections to the Internet, and will only connect via IPv6.

The primary transition plan is to “dual-stack” all current devices by adding IPv6 support to everything that currently has an IPv4 address. By adding native IPv6 functionality to devices using IPv4, all of that connectivity will be able to speak via IPv6 without transitional technologies like NAT (Network Address Translation). This work will take several years, and time is not a luxury we have with the dwindling IPv4 pool.

Like George mentioned in a previous post, I see World IPv6 Launch day as a call-to-action for a “game changer.” The IPv6 transition has gotten a ton of visibility from some of the most recognizable names on the Internet, but the importance and urgency of the transition can’t be overstated.

So, what does that mean for you?

To a certain extent, that depends on what your involvement is on the Internet. Here are a few steps everyone can take:

• Learn all you can about IPv6 to prepare for the work ahead. A few good books about IPv6 have been published, and resources like ARIN’s IPv6 Information Wiki are perfect places to get more information.
• If you own servers or network equipment, check them for IPv6 functionality. Upgrade or replace any software or devices to ensure that you can deliver native IPv6 connectivity end-to-end without any adverse impact to IPv6 users. If any piece of gear isn’t IPv6-capable, IPv6 traffic won’t be able to pass through your network.
• If you are a content provider, make your content available via IPv6. This starts with requesting IPv6 service from your ISP. At SoftLayer, that’s done via a zero-cost sales request to add IPv6 addresses to your VLANs. You should target 100% coverage for your services or applications — providing the same content via IPv6 as you do via IPv4. Take an inventory of all your DNS records, and after you’ve tested extensively, publish AAAA records for all hostnames to start attracting IPv6 traffic.
• If you are receiving Internet connectivity to your home or business desktops, demand IPv6 services from your upstream ISP. Also be sure to check your access routers, switches and desktops to ensure they are running the most recent code with stable IPv6 support.
• If you are running equipment such as firewalls, load balancers, IDS, etc., contact your vendors to learn about their IPv6 support and how to properly configure those devices. You want to make sure you aren’t limiting performance or exposing any vulnerabilities.

Starting now, there are no more excuses. It’s time to get IPv6 up and running if you want to play a part in tomorrow’s Internet.

-Dani

Last week, I had the privilege of attending Red Herring‘s Top 100 North America Tech Award ceremony in Santa Monica. If you’re not familiar with Red Herring, it harkens back to the headier days of the of the dot-com era in the late 90′s and early 00′s. While the markets have fluctuated quite a bit in the last dozen years, the startup scene has survived, and the optimism of the dot-com boom is still alive and well, albeit via more focused entrepreneurs that intentionally practice cold hard pragmatism and have bootstrap mentalities.

Today, the Red Herring Top 100 still serves as a great barometer for identifying promising new companies and entrepreneurs. The publication’s editors are quick to point out that they were among the first to recognize that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube and eBay would change the way we live and work. That’s the start to a pretty nice little “alumni” list if you ask me.

How does a company make the cut?

The Top 100 were judged on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, IP creation, CAGR, execution of strategy, and disruption in their respective industries.

Before the Top 100 are selected, each finalist has an opportunity to pitch their business model and share why they think they should be included. I heard one entrepreneur say, “I have over a million dollars invested from my family and friends, so this can’t fail.” These businesses may have started as simple ideas, but they’re fueled by an entrepreneurial passion that have pushed them to become truly remarkable. Many of the finalists had already reached a certain level of success and were trying to build and scale-out their ideas — everything from new mobile apps, open source and storage offerings to cloud and big data optimized solutions.

While preparing a little bit of information for SoftLayer’s presentation, I was pleasantly surprised to see that more than 20 finalists for Red Herring’s Top 100 Americas Award were active SoftLayer customers!

After the editors made the tough decisions to narrow down the finalists to the Top 100 winners, SoftLayer was honored and excited to join 10gen, Backupify, Cloudera, CVision Technologies, MedAvante, PageFreezer Software, RingRevenue, VigLink and Zencoder. At least 10% of the 2012 Red Herring Americas Top 100 companies are using SoftLayer.

Early in my tenure at SoftLayer, a colleague told me, “We aren’t looking to be the next big thing, we are looking to enable it.” That’s probably not going to stop us from throwing our hat in the ring to be considered for the Global 100 this fall, though.

-Andre

A few years ago, I went through a nightmare trying to get to permanent resident status in the United States. My file sat in a box for over a year, was lost, re-submitted and FINALLY rushed through by Ted Kennedy’s office. And I was on a “fast track” due to a long record of published research and employment history. I had the means to pay lawyers and the time to repeat the filing and wait for a decision. If I didn’t have the means or the time to wait for the process to complete, I don’t know where I’d be, but in all likelihood, it wouldn’t be here. It’s no surprise that immigration reform is high on my list of priorities, and given SoftLayer’s involvement in the USCIS Entrepreneurs in Residence program along with Lance’s appointment to a Bloomberg committee focused on immigration reform, it’s clear I’m not alone.

The bi-partisan Partnership for a New American Economy recently published a very interesting report — Not Coming to America: Why the US is Falling Behind in the Global Race for Talent — that speaks to a lot of the challenges plaguing the current US immigration policy. Because of those challenges, “the future of America’s position as the global magnet for the world’s most talented and hardest-working is in jeopardy.” Here are a few of the projected economic realities of not reforming immigration laws to keep up with other countries:

SHORTAGE OF WORKERS IN INNOVATION INDUSTRIES: Jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (“STEM” fields) are increasing three times faster than jobs in the rest of the economy, but American students are not entering these innovative fields in sufficient numbers. As a result, by 2018, we face a projected shortfall of 230,000 qualified advanced-degree STEM workers.

SHORTAGE OF YOUNG WORKERS: The US population is aging, baby boomers are retiring en masse, and the growth in the US labor force has slowed to historic lows of less than 1 percent. We cannot continue to produce the GDP growth the nation has come to expect without dramatic increases in productivity or welcoming more working age immigrants.

A STALLED ECONOMY: The US has faced years of stunted economic growth. History shows that new businesses are the biggest drivers of job creation, yet the most recent US Census data show that the number of business startups has hit a record low.

This concern isn’t unique to the United States. With a global focus on innovation and technology, countries around the world are actively competing for the best and the brightest. In Canada, a report a few weeks ago spoke to Canada’s need to double in size in the next few decades or risk losing relevance and becoming just another resource-rich colony. The nation’s response? It’s ready to open its doors to more immigrants.

The same applies to the United States … It just may take longer.

Go back to how this country was built, and apply that to today. The biggest difference: The “skilled trades” we talk about in the most general sense are no longer carpenters like my grandfather but highly educated programmers, engineers and researchers. The idea isn’t to replace the programmers, engineers and researchers in the US, rather it’s to meet the existing unmet needs for programmers, engineers and researchers.

In all of SoftLayer’s efforts to affect change in the US immigration policy, we have to make clear that our goal is not to drop the walls simply to add more permanent residents. It’s about lowering many of the current artificial barriers that might prevent the next Fortune 500 founder from starting his or her business in the United States. If you don’t think that’s a serious concern, I’d point to a pretty surprising stat in the “Not Coming to America” report: “Today, more than 40 percent of America’s Fortune 500 companies were founded by an immigrant or a child of an immigrant.”

Immigration drives the economy. It’s not a drain on the economy. Every country needs more smart people because smart people create new ideas, new ideas become new businesses, and new businesses create new jobs.

Because this is a politically charged issue, it’s one I know many people don’t necessarily agree with. Along with immigration, we have to look at how the education system can empower young people like my son to become the programmers, engineers and researchers that the US will need, and we have to be intentional about not simply adding permanent residents for the sake of adding permanent residents. If you have any thoughts one way or the other, I’d encourage you to share them with us here in a blog comment or link us to any of the resources you’ve found interesting in researching and discussing the topic.

-@gkdog

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a renowned scholar in the field of psychology, said, “In large organizations the dilution of information as it passes up and down the hierarchy, and horizontally across departments, can undermine the effort to focus on common goals.” That’s one of the biggest reasons SoftLayer shares a weekly internal newsletter with SLayers in all departments and in all locations. Keeping coworkers informed of corporate activities (and “common goals”) may not be very high on everyone’s to-do list, but it’s certainly at the top of mine … literally. As Marketing Coordinator, I’m responsible for sending out a weekly update to ALL SoftLayer staff.

If you have a growing or geographically diverse team, rallying the troops around a shared message is a great way to keep everyone on the same page. If you’re not sure where to start with your own internal newsletter, I’d be happy to dissect what goes into our “Weekly Breakdown” as an example you might build from.

The Weekly Breakdown kicks off with employee birthdays. We want to make sure all 700+ SLayers know when one of their coworkers is getting a year “better,” and every month, huge birthday cakes are brought to every office to recognize the SLayers celebrating their birthdays. We haven’t written a SoftLayer version of a cheesy-restaurant rendition of the classic “Happy Birthday” song, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.

In addition to employee birthdays, we’ll also call out important days (like SoftLayer’s birthday: May 5!) in the birthday section.

The next section in the Breakdown is similar to the “Birthdays” section, but it’s a little more relevant to our business: “Anniversaries This Month.” When you’re hired at SoftLayer, you basically get a SoftLayer birthday, and we want to recognize how long you’ve been a SLayer:

After we recognize the SoftLayer anniversaries, we have a section devoted to keeping employees informed of various activities going on at SoftLayer. That might be a recent press release, an update on holidays or an upcoming company event. This section is the go-to place for employees to know what’s new with SoftLayer.

The next few sections list available SL Job Openings, New Hires from the previous week, and Organizational Changes. Given that SoftLayer is still growing like crazy, we want to make sure all of our employees see the available positions in the organization so they can share with their network of friends or so they can see any opportunities they feel might better suit their talents and passions. It’s always nice to know who is helping SoftLayer grow (new employees) and how they are growing with SoftLayer, whether vertically or horizontally (organizational changes).

The next two sections are dedicated to employees “personal” lives: Classifieds and Fundraising Events. These sections let employees list anything they are selling or giving away along with any fundraising activities or events that they, their kids, their neighbor or their dog are involved in. We’ve had classified items like car wheels, stereos and animal adoptions, and you can bet that employees were voraciously reading the “Fundraising” section when Girl Scout Cookie orders were being taken.

We wrap up the Weekly Breakdown with my favorite section: SoftLayer Praise. There are so many reasons why the section gives me joy. It’s amazing how many wonderful comments our customers have about SoftLayer on a weekly basis, and it’s a “pat on the back” for teams that may not interact directly with customers on a daily basis. Sharing all of the praise is great for morale, and those little compliments here and there go a long way to making our team continue working hard … even if just to hear those comments again and again! Here are some of my favorite comments from the past few weeks:

Those kinds of comments can put a smile on any SLayers face!

If you have any wonderful comments to say about SoftLayer or an individual employee, don’t be scared to tell us … Your comment might just be featured in our next “Weekly Breakdown.” Comment on this blog, use SoftLayer’s “Get Satisfaction” page, tweet @SoftLayer or post to our Facebook page. We love to hearing from you and working hard to remain the “best hosting company [you] know of!”

As you can see, the Weekly Breakdown covers a lot of SoftLayer goodness in a given week. It takes a little work to keep a 700-SLayer organization on the same page, but that work pays off exponentially when the team is able to share accomplishments, praise and goals. I’d highly recommend you trying your own weekly internal newsletter … Now leave us some SL praise!

-Natalie

Chris Gardner (of The Pursuit of Happyness fame) said, “Find something that you love. Something that gets you so excited you can’t wait to get out of bed in the morning. Forget about money. Be happy.” Now I can’t honestly tell you I’m able to “forget about money” or that I’m much of a morning person, but I’m quick to tell people that I love what I do. If you click through a few of the “Culture” posts on this blog, you’ll read that I’m not alone. This week, I realized how many non-work interests SoftLayer plays a role in.

Beyond my closet-full of black and red shirts (many of which are visible in Tech Partner Spotlight video interviews on YouTube), even when I’m out of the office I find myself “checking on customers’ servers” quite a bit … I use quotes in there because that the justification I give myself for spending time (that I’d probably spend anyway) on platforms that leverage SoftLayer’s infrastructure.

Because SoftLayer operates with an “Innovate or Die” mentality, we tend to attract customers that innovate in their own businesses. Whether that trend is intentional or not, it makes sense: Why would a fast-moving platform or application with massive growth and scaling needs be hosted with a provider taking “enterprise” time to provision a solution that ends up being “enterprise” only in name? “Enterprise Class” is not the same as “Internet Scale,” and that distinction is pretty significant when a business might have one visitor on Monday and a million visitors on Tuesday. Platforms and applications that grow like that usually operate with a high level of what I like to call “awesomeness,” so when they choose SoftLayer as a hosting provider, I feel like I need to investigate their awesomeness personally … And that’s how I’ve become a die-hard user of many of SoftLayer’s customers.

One of my favorite customers to “check on” is Tumblr. If you aren’t familiar with Tumblr, I recommend that you go to their site right now and immerse yourself in their community. I actually remember the day Tumblr signed on as a customer; I was genuinely excited that they’d be hosting on our platform. Even if that excitement was because I could justify having my Tumblr dashboard open in the background at work. I don’t think anyone could have expected the platform to grow so phenomenally in a few years, but Tumblr’s numbers are pretty staggering these days: 16.7 billion (yes, with a “B”) monthly pageviews of 55.7 million blogs with 23.1 billion posts. I wasn’t one of the first accounts on Tumblr, but I tell myself I have some kind of Tumblr cred … And I use my “limited-edition” black background and Japanese dashboard logo to prove it:

Another SoftLayer customer who’s gotten a lot of press over the past month or two is OMGPOP. OMGPOP scaled “Draw Something” to tens of millions of users on SoftLayer’s infrastructure (which you probably know), but what you probably didn’t know is that as “Draw Something” started growing in the market, it was also spreading virally in our office. You’d be amazed at how many SLayers caught the bug. Here’s one of Steve Kinman‘s works of art from a recent game:

While Tumblr and OMGPOP manage to snag a good amount of my free time, my most recent obsession has been playing NomNom Combo from Eastside Game Studios. I had a chance to meet a few of the guys from Eastside Games at GDC this year, and George Karidis told me that I should download NomNom Combo to check it out before I went to the launch party we sponsored for them in San Francisco. As it turns out, he created a monster … By the time the party rolled around, I had to tear myself away from strategizing the best way to move up the game’s all-time “Top Score” leader board. Two months later, I can say that all of my efforts have been validated:

I guess if I had to make a long story short, if you have an addictive app or game that you want to move to the SoftLayer platform, it would be brilliant move from a growth and scaling perspective. One request I’d have is that you warn me, though. I want to have time to bury my head in the sand so I don’t get hooked on more SoftLayer-powered goodness … I’m running out of “free time.”

-@khazard

The past two weeks have been HUGE for the SoftLayer community development team and our Catalyst Program. In addition to the typical insanity of crisscrossing the country to attend startup events and scheduled “office hours” in Boulder, San Francisco, Boston and New York City, I was invited to visit a pretty noteworthy address in Washington, D.C.: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Yes … SoftLayer was invited to the White House!

I was honored and humbled to be recognized as one of 5 Entrepreneurs in Residence for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. As a part of the Entrepreneurs in Residence initiative, I joined the other private sector participants in the Secretary of War Suite on April 26 for an EIR roundtable meeting. I’d describe the meeting as “historic,” but given the “history” at the White House, I might have to choose a different word:

The USCIS is looking to make it easier for entrepreneurs and innovators to get to the United States to have the opportunity and resources they need to build the next Google or Facebook … or SoftLayer. It’s no coincidence that the Entrepreneurs in Residence roundtable discussion harkened to a few hundred similar conversations I’ve had with startups, startup accelerators and incubator programs so far this year. On the topic of startups, I wasn’t just an empty suit … though I was wearing a suit (for a change).

When it comes to credibility in the startup space, SoftLayer has become quite an authority. Beyond our own growth and success as a startup a few short years ago, we’ve spent the last year investing in relationships with startup communities and the organizations fueling innovation in the US and around the world. For a perfect example of that investment, just look at today’s news: SoftLayer Gives Next Generation of Entrepreneurs Foundation for Success with TechStars National Sponsorship.

You’ve heard us say it a million times, and you’ll probably hear us say it a million more: SoftLayer loves startups, and we want to do everything we can to inspire, mentor and cultivate the next wave of world-changing businesses. From providing mentorship and hosting credits to participating in the conversations that will shape the startup landscape in the US for years to come, SoftLayer’s representing.

If you have an idea, a business plan or just a brilliantly talented team looking for some direction, take a look at the TechStars 2012 Program Schedule and Apply for TechStars to get in on their fun in San Antonio, Boston, NYC, Boulder or Seattle. If you already have a killer startup that just needs a little help in scaling your success, hit us up at startups@softlayer.com, and we can tell you a little more about the Catalyst Program.

-@PaulFord

SoftLayer is in the business of helping businesses scale. You need 1,000 cloud computing instances? We’ll make sure our system can get them online in 10 minutes. You need to spin up some beefy dedicated servers loaded with dual 8-core Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors and high-capacity SSDs for a new application’s I/O-intensive database? We’ll get it online anywhere in the world in under four hours. Everywhere you look, you’ll see examples of how we help our customers scale, but what you don’t hear much about is how our operations team scales our infrastructure to ensure we can accommodate all of our customers’ growth.

When we launch a new data center, there’s usually a lot of fanfare. When AMS01 and SNG01 came online, we talked about the thousands of servers that are online and ready. We meet huge demand for servers on a daily basis, and that presents us with a challenge: What happens when the inventory of available servers starts dwindling?

Truck Day.

Truck Day not limited to a single day of the year (or even a single day in a given month) … It’s what we call any date our operations team sets for delivery and installation of new hardware. We communicate to all of our teams about the next Truck Day in each location so SLayers from every department can join the operations team in unboxing and preparing servers/racks for installation. The operations team gets more hands to speed up the unloading process, and every employee has an opportunity to get first-hand experience in how our data centers operate.

If you want a refresher course about what happens on a Truck Day, you can reference Sam Fleitman’s “Truck Day Operations” blog, and if you want a peek into what it looks like, you can watch Truck Day at SR02.DAL05. I don’t mean to make this post all about Truck Day, but Truck Day is instrumental in demonstrating the way SoftLayer scales our own infrastructure.

Let’s say we install 1,000 servers to officially launch a new pod. Because each pod has slots for 5,000 servers, we have space/capacity for 3,000-4,000 more servers in the server room, so as soon as more server hardware becomes available, we’ll order it and start preparing for our next Truck Day to supplement the pod’s inventory. You’d be surprised how quickly 1,000 servers can be ordered, and because it’s not very easy to overnight a pallet of servers, we have to take into account lead time and shipping speeds … To accommodate our customers’ growth, we have to stay one step ahead in our own growth.

This morning in a meeting, I saw a pretty phenomenal bullet that got me thinking about this topic:

Truck Day — 4/3 (All Sites): 2,673 Servers

In nine different data center facilities around the world, more than 2,500 servers were delivered, unboxed, racked and brought online. Last week. In one day.

Now I know the operations team wasn’t looking for any kind of recognition … They were just reporting that everything went as planned. Given the fact that an accomplishment like that is “just another day at SoftLayer” for those guys, they definitely deserve recognition for the amazing work they do. We host some of the most popular platforms, games and applications on the Internet, and the DC-Ops team plays a huge role in scaling SoftLayer so our customers can scale themselves.

-@gkdog

Sometimes it’s the little hardships and annoyances that really mold you. How do you react? Do you manage to work through them, or do you let them eat away at you to the point that you’re more paralyzed by them than you are a bigger problem?

As a new hire, I was required to take part in a Truck Day — an experience that helps everyone in the company understand (at a base level) what is involved with the actual products and services we sell. If you’ve ever had the fortune of working on one, there are certain activities that can leave you feeling weary. For me, that weariness-inducing activity was working with cage nuts.

For those of you unfamiliar with cage nuts, they’re small pieces of metal that accommodate screw-in server rails on a rack meant for slide-in server rails. Installing them is one of the most frustrating things ever … They have two little clips that fit inside the rack, and you have to bend them to get them in. Here’s a great illustration of how they work from an Oracle Sun Rack user’s guide:

I’d installed them before, but never more than eight or so at a time. After Truck Day, I now have nothing but the greatest respect for the amazing people working in the data centers who have to do them in massive volumes. I don’t think I’ve ever received as many tiny cuts on my hand as I did in the few hours I spent installing the relatively small number I managed to complete.

As a Customer Support Administrator (CSA), I spend the majority of my time sitting at a computer, helping customers with their servers and doing my best to resolve issues as they are encountered. Physically installing cage nuts isn’t part of my day-to-day responsibilities (until the next Truck Day), but I realized that my job has its own “cage nuts.”

A customer wanting to lease a server from us isn’t particularly worried about the fact that cage nuts have to be meticulously installed in the rack, and they also aren’t paying any mind to the fact I might have worked with a dozen customers in my shift already — And, certainly, they shouldn’t. They’re paying for a great customer experience and helpful, friendly service, so they don’t need to take into account the context of our operations when they’re simply asking for us to help them with a server reboot to finish the installation of an OS patch upgrade.

SoftLayer, as a company, has amazed me in that everyone I’ve met is not only willing to deal with their “cage nuts,” but they will also do so without losing the smile from their face (even if there’s some good-natured grumbling every now and then). In many of the places I’ve worked, this sort of task would be met with protest, foot dragging and a tired resignation to doing the work. That simply isn’t the case here.

I’m definitely a newbie around here, and I’m still getting a feel for the culture, catching up on the inside jokes, and learning the ins and outs of the company (and the people in it). The one thing that was abundantly clear to me from the very first night, though: SLayers are truly dedicated to what they do, and the resulting work environment is one that fosters and rewards that dedication.

So in my estimation, how have the little annoyances — the cage nuts of our lives — molded SoftLayer and the people who work here? I’d say that not only do we work through them, we do so enthusiastically in the company of friends, proud of the fact that these seemingly small things are part of what has made this all possible.

I hope all of you work in environments that enable you to deal with the small things you see every day without cursing under your breath and feeling stressed. If you don’t, maybe you should look into finding a place that does. I hear we’re hiring.

-Gregory

“If you build it, he will come.”

I hope I’m not alone as I find myself whispering those words in my head as I read them. If you’ve seen Field of Dreams*, you know that Kevin Costner mysteriously hears and sees things no one else can see, and he seems like a lunatic when he follows the instructions of his invisible guide. He builds a baseball diamond on his farm land, and famous baseball players like Shoeless Joe Jackson come to play from the afterlife. He took a risk to build something with faith that it would yield results.

It’s a lot like the way most visionaries and entrepreneurs take risks to make their marks on the world.

Taking an idea from inception to market is much like building a baseball field in the middle of your farmland. You can factor in all the “knowns” (size, shape, materials, etc.), but in the end, you have to trust that consumers will come. Faith in a product or service drives the concept forward, and second-guessing it or working at it halfheartedly can destroy its slim chance of success. As a company so keenly focused on innovation ourselves, we find that other innovators are drawn to us, and because I’ve had the unique opportunity to work with many of our extremely successful companies, I thought I’d put together a few simple questions you might ask yourself as you transition from inspiration to action:

1. Is your idea possible to execute? Will it be easy for the market to understand and adopt?
2. Are there technologies available to deliver the idea or will you need to build your own?
3. Are the resources you’re using to build the product the best you can leverage?

If you answered, “No,” to the first question, you might want to hit the drawing board to come up with a new strategy or approach as you aim to meet the unmet needs of the market. Don’t get discouraged at this point … By spending more time simplifying and clarifying your idea, you’re saving an exponentially greater amount of time that you’d waste having to redefine or reposition your product down the road. If you answered, “Yes,” move on to Question 2.

Question 2 will start setting a baseline of the amount of effort required to get your idea to a functional state. You might hang on Question 2 for a while as you learn more about available technologies or lay the groundwork for your project, but by doing so, you’ll have a more concrete estimate of the timeline you can expect. Once you feel confident and comfortable with the answers to Question 1 and Question 2, the last step you need to take is to Question 3.

Question 3 can be pretty far-reaching — people, technologies and even hardware/software. These are some of the “knowns” that I referenced earlier. Note that “the best you can leverage” is not necessarily going to be “the best available.” Startup ideas generally are equipped with startup resources. Cost, expertise and comfort are going to play a huge role in the adoption of resources.

One of the big roadblocks many budding entrepreneurs run into is that they have trouble preparing for success. Build your product with the expectation that it will be successful. Know what you can do to accommodate the spike in demand you’ll see when Oprah and Bono give you a shout-out.

SoftLayer has been successful because we did our best to answer with those three questions, and as we continue to grow and succeed, we live and breathe innovation. We’d like to think that we’re some of “the crazy ones” Apple referenced in its epic “Think Different” campaign, and we want to empower our customers to be a little crazy themselves.

-Clayton

*If you haven’t seen Field of Dreams yet, you should find a way to watch it immediately, if not sooner.

Last week, I spent a few days at GDC in San Francisco, getting a glimpse into the latest games hitting the market. Game developers are a unique bunch, and that uniqueness goes beyond the unbelievable volume of NOS Energy Drinks they consume … They like to test and push the IT envelope, making games more diverse, interactive and social.

The new crop of games showcased at GDC is more resource-intensive — it’s almost like watching an IT arms race; they’re upping the ante for all online gaming companies. The appetite from the public remains relentless, and the pay-off can be huge. Consider that gaming industry research firm DFC Intelligence predicts that worldwide market revenue generated solely from online games is set to reach $26.4 billion in 2015, more than double the $11.9 achieved in 2009.

That’s where SoftLayer comes in. We understand the high stakes in the gaming world and have tailored our IaaS offerings for an optimal end-user experience that stretches from initial release to everyday play. Take a look at what game developer OMGPOP (a SoftLayer customer) achieved with Draw Something: Almost overnight it became the #1 application in Apple’s App Store, tallying more than 26 million downloads in just a few weeks. To put the volume of gameplay into perspective, the game itself is generating more than 30 hours of drawings per second. That’s what what we refer to as “Internet Scale.” When YouTube hit one hour of video uploads per second, they came up with a pretty impressive presentation to talk about that scale … and that’s only one hour per second.

Gamers require a high-performance, always on, graphically attractive and quick-responding experience. If they don’t get that experience, they move on to the next game that can give it to them. With our core strengths of automation and extensive network reach, game developers come to us to easily enable that experience, and in return, they get a platform where they can develop, test, deploy and yes, play their latest games. True “Internet Scale” with easy consumptive billing … Get in and out quickly, and use only what you need.

Some of the most interesting and innovative use cases of how customers take advantage of our platform come from the gaming industry. Because we make it easy to rapidly provision resources (deploy dedicated servers in less than two hours and cloud servers in as few as five minutes) in an automated way (our API), many developers have started incorporating cloud-like functions into their games and applications that add dedicated resources to their infrastructure on-demand as you’d only expect to see in a virtual environment. Now that Flex Images are available, we’re expecting to see a lot more of that.

As I was speaking with a few customers on the show floor, I was amazed to hear how passionate they were about what one called the “secret ingredient” at SoftLayer: Our network. He talked about his trials and tribulations in delivering global reach and performance before he transitioned his infrastructure to SoftLayer, and hearing what our high-bandwidth and low-latency architecture has meant for his games was an affirmation for all of the work we’ve put into creating (and continuing to build) the network.

The rapid pace of innovation and change that keeps the gaming industry going is almost electric … When you walk into a room filled with game developers, their energy is contagious. We ended GDC with an opportunity to do just that. We were proud to sponsor a launch party for our friends at East Side Game Studios as the celebrated the release of two new games — Zombinis and Ruby Skies. Since their NomNom Combo puzzle game is one of the most addicting games on my iPhone, it was a no-brainer to hook up with them at GDC. If you want a peek into the party, check out our GDC photo album on Facebook.

To give you an idea of how much the gaming culture permeates the SoftLayer offices, I need only point out a graffiti mural on one of the walls in our HQ office in Dallas. Because we sometimes get nostalgic for the days of misspent youth in video arcades playing Pac Man, Donkey Kong and Super Mario, we incorporated those iconic games in a piece of artwork in our office:

If you are an aspiring game developer, we’d like to hear from you and help enable the next Internet gaming sensation … Having a good amount of experience with our existing customer base should assure you that we know what we’re talking about. For now, though, it’s my turn to go “Draw Something.”

-@gkdog